Monday, September 28, 2015

Entry Event for PBL

On Monday, September 14, I delivered my "entry event"
for a PBL unit I am trying out on immigration. The project is linked to
the novel we read, which is about a Jewish family fleeing Russia in 1919. The
entry event is supposed to get the students interested/excited/engaged in the
project, but also should introduce the driving question that will push the
project forward. During the session the students listened to the poem from the
base of the Statue of Liberty, looked at different documents related to
immigration, studied photographs of different immigrant groups across the
years, and analyzed a graph showing numbers of immigrants coming to the US by
year. At the end of the class, they were given a boat ticket to travel to
America. (A blank ticket, that they will later fill out with the fictional
details of an immigrant from a country of their choice!)

The
driving question is: "Why do people leave everything they know to move to
a new country?"